Comments

1. Your Nuts says:

   13 January 2010 at 23:45

   Wow hav­ing to do proper licens­ing is trouble­some for you? Are you sure you should be doing this type of work. Cisco should have been enfor­cing this all along, they do on the MDS, PIX, ASA, IPS, Nexus, etc etc. Unified Communication Manager has for a while, and unity has as well.

   THis is part of life, get used to it. People want to be paid for their work.

   Instead of com­plain­ing why not exam­ine how many com­pan­ies buy IP BASE and use advanced IP ser­vices? This is a rev­enue loss for Cisco, which lowers the money they can spend on sup­port and R&D. Come on be real­istic here and not hyped up.

   Reply
   • Greg Ferro says:

     14 January 2010 at 11:23

     I don’t have a prob­lem with it, but a lot of people cer­tainly will. Many people are not good at learn­ing and the licens­ing require­ment will change a lot of cor­por­ate and enter­prise oper­a­tion plans. Not every­one is highly motiv­ated and will­ing to learn new methods.

     Second, it is for Cisco to decide to make more rev­enue by enfor­cing licens­ing and that’s fine by me. However, Cisco already makes a 65% gross profit mar­gin on their products and I believe that the price of soft­ware licenses has been built in to the over­all product price (espe­cially the hardware).

     The ques­tion is whether we will see reduc­tions in the price of hard­ware now the price of the soft­ware licenses is enforced. The increase in soft­ware rev­enue should mean a reduc­tion in hard­ware price, but I doubt that this will hap­pen. I expect Cisco to increase their profit mar­gin even further.

     Will cus­tom­ers con­tinue to pay the high prices or switch Huawei instead ? Many com­pan­ies have already switched for exactly that reason.

     Reply
   • Gruic says:

     28 January 2010 at 20:17

     Cisco is way expens­ive for what you’re get­ting. As a CCNP with over 15 years exper­i­ence with Cisco products, I’ve seen them go from a dynamic grow­ing com­pany to greedy SOBs. We’ve known this day would come for a long time and for a lot of my cus­tom­ers, it now means not choos­ing cisco gear. This also basic­ally kills the used gear mar­ket for cisco. Want to get a bit more life out of that router? Now you’ll have to throw it away instead of get the next soft­ware release for it. I see a the future in crowd-​​sourced pro­jects that are also open source. Vyatta​.com is a good example of what a crowd-​​sourced pro­ject can accom­plish. It’s tough enough to be a good engin­eer and keep up with everything, without hav­ing to spend even more BS time deal­ing with licens­ing… Just my two cents. Take it or leave it. –Gruic

     Reply
2. 1001QA says:

   14 January 2010 at 22:39

   Any idea what is going to hap­pen with the people who want to prac­tice with older hard­ware but with the new­est IOS? Is there going to be a “For train­ing only” licens­ing pro­gram?
   When do you thing we can expect this new IOS in the CCIE labs?

   Reply
3. Nicolas says:

   15 January 2010 at 13:25

   Good Post, I didn’t know about this Feature Licensing. On the other hand, while flash cards are cheaper these days (espe­cially non Cisco), it seems like you’d also need some extra RAM to run 15.0, don’t you?. Thanks.

   Reply
4. Steve B says:

   18 January 2010 at 18:30

   I think “Your Nuts” is on the Cisco board. The Bonus cent­ric mind­set is the only reason for an atti­tude that belligerent.

   Anyway my 2p worth:

   Pros: Less trouble/​confusion over IOS images i.e. Problems TFTP’ing, get­ting wrong ver­sion and not hav­ing the fea­ture you require etc

   Much sim­pler to upgrade IOS Image (Although this isn’t exactly a daily thing IMO, updat­ing the ver­sion rather than image type is much more likely)

   Err that’s all I can think off.

   Cons: An extra stage of work when car­ry­ing out a hard­ware swap, if it’s a high sever­ity issue and there is a prob­lem with the license side of thing people are going to get annoyed as Cisco have made their product less user friendly.

   Issues with training(GNS3) and test­ing in a lab envir­on­ment. Performance/​high end fea­ture crippled IOS images being released to indi­vidu­als via their CCO login would be nice to solve this?

   Confusion, hassle and time/​money wasted as changes have to be diges­ted by enter­prises large and small. Will surely involve down­time for someone, some­where the first time they encounter it.

   Feeling of being ripped off by Cisco. Not an issue so much for me as an Operations Engineer but look­ing at the big­ger pic­ture I agree fully with your com­ments above about profit mar­gins and the point at which people move to HP, Huawei etc

   Reply
5. Jenny says:

   4 February 2010 at 21:07

   Hi Greg,

   I came across your quote in Jessica Scarpati’s art­icle on SearchDataCenter, and posed the ques­tion to our members:

   http://​itknow​ledgeex​change​.techtar​get​.com/​i​t​a​n​s​w​e​r​s​/​c​i​s​c​o​s​-​i​o​s​-​e​m​u​l​a​t​o​r​-​c​r​a​c​k​d​o​w​n​-​w​h​a​t​-​a​r​e​-​y​o​u​r​-thoughts/

   Do you think an “edu­ca­tional license” or some­thing sim­ilar would be help­ful in eas­ing some of these concerns?

   Reply
6. Kiwi says:

   19 February 2010 at 13:50

   The major­ity of the routers we are deploy­ing are for VPN func­tions — in the­ory licen­cing should be a huge advant­age as effect­ively every­one new ²⁹⁰⁰⁄₃₉₀₀ router pur­chase has all the hard­ware we need and we unlock it as required versus pre­vi­ous routers where we needed AIM’s/additional RAM/​flash to get a base unit upto the level of a VPN secur­ity bundle router.

   There are two major down­sides:
    – I can see this caus­ing prob­lems with GNS so it will push some of the prob­lems we deal with intern­ally from GNS back to TAC
    – there’s some licen­cing gotchas (3900’s will only do 85Mbps IPSec on a secur­ity licence). Yes they’ll be fixed, but it’s annoy­ing pay­ing for one level of per­form­ance and get­ting less. The fix is a new licence which will prob­ably more money

   Reply

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1. :),, حان وقت التغيير IOS تحديث جديد في سيسكو says:

   29 January 2010 at 11:49

   […] Greg Ferro of Etherealmind has poin­ted out, IOS 15.0 will be intro­du­cing some sig­ni­fic­ant com­plex­ity into the way we install and man­age IOS […]

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